Self-Portrait in Black and White Quotes

“The truth is that no matter how long and hard you try—you cannot struggle your way out of a straitjacket that does not exist. But pretending it exists, for whatever the reason, really does leave you in a severely restricted posture.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

“One way or another, we are going to have to figure out how to make our multiethnic realities work, and one of the great intellectual projects facing us—in America and abroad—will be to develop a vision of ourselves strong and supple enough both to acknowledge the lingering importance of inherited group identities while also attenuating, rather than reinforcing, the extent to which such identities are able to define us.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

“But history's utility, while necessary, is diminished greatly when it smothers the light of the present day, overshadowing the genuine possibility and beauty the here and now may contain . . . We have a responsibility to remember, yes, but we also have the right and I believe even the duty to continuously remake ourselves anew.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

“Now, if I find liberation in moments of doubt, it comes with the one movement I always end up having to make, the only movement I can make—away from the abstract, general, and hypothetical and back into the jagged grain of the here and now, into the humanizing specificity of my love for my father, mother, brother, wife, and children, and into my sheer delight in their existence as distinct and irreplaceable people, not “bodies”—as contemporary lingo would have it—or avatars, sites of racial characteristics and traits, reincarnations of conflicts and prejudices past. Through these people I love, I am left with myself as the same, as a man and a human being who is free to choose and who has made choices and is not reducible to a set of historical circumstances and mistakes.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

“THERE HAVE BEEN FEW ERAS in the history of the United States during which the racial malady of the nation, always lying in wait like Camus’s plague, flared to the proportions”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

“The idea of racial categorization is an old one, but it is not an ancient one. We know that the Roman playwright Terence observed, “I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me.” And we know that Imperial Rome was a dizzyingly cosmopolitan milieu, men and women speaking all manner of tongues, worshipping all manner of gods, displaying all manner of skin tones moving through it. And yet it’s worth lingering a moment longer on the fact that Terence did not proclaim, as he might have, “I am Roman, therefore nothing Roman is alien to me.” It has become a commonplace to acknowledge the following point, but it bears repeating anyway: the idea of distinct human races, as we understand it today, only stretches back to Enlightenment Europe, which is to say to the eighteenth century. I have stayed in inns in Germany and eaten at taverns in Spain that have been continuously operating longer than this calamitous thought. With the publication of Systema Naturae, in 1735, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist and “father of modern taxonomy,” fatefully split mankind into four color-coded strands, Europaeus albus, Americanus rubescens, Asiaticus fuscus, Africanus niger; later, the German naturalist, “father of anthropology,” and coiner of that confused and confusing term “Caucasian,”# Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, would have us be five, the aforementioned “Caucasian” (white), “Mongolian” (yellow), “Malayan” (brown), “Ethiopian” (black), and “American” (red), though to his credit he deemphasized hierarchical thinking. The divisions have always been somewhat arbitrary and imprecise, and have fluctuated many times since. What these scientists were attempting, however inadequately, was simply to describe the real physical differences that they observed in the world around them.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

“The idea of racial categorization is an old one, but it is not an ancient one. We know that the Roman playwright Terence observed, “I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me.” And we know that Imperial Rome was a dizzyingly cosmopolitan milieu, men and women speaking all manner of tongues, worshipping all manner of gods, displaying all manner of skin tones moving through it. And yet it’s worth lingering a moment longer on the fact that Terence did not proclaim, as he might have, “I am Roman, therefore nothing Roman is alien to me.” It has become a commonplace to acknowledge the following point, but it bears repeating anyway: the idea of distinct human races, as we understand it today, only stretches back to Enlightenment Europe, which is to say to the eighteenth century. I have stayed in inns in Germany and eaten at taverns in Spain that have been continuously operating longer than this calamitous thought.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

“Working toward opposing conclusions, racists and many anti-racists alike eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while any of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

“It is easier to believe that the world does not change,” Leon Wieseltier observed about anti-Semitism, “than to believe that the world changes slowly.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

“A Roberto Bolaño quote I underlined and copied into a notebook from that time gave the following advice: “Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.” That is exactly what I made it my business to do.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

“One way ot another, we are going to have to figure out how to make our multiethnic realities work, and one of the great intellectual projects facing us--in America and abroad--will be to develop a vision of ourselves strong and supple enough both to acknowledge the lingering importance of inherited group identities while also attenuating, rather than reinforcing, the extent to which such identities are able to define us.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race